Track Laying For the Entire Chengdu-Guizhou High-speed Railway Line

At around 11:00 am on October 10th, in Bijie City, Guizhou Province, the first pair of steel rails fell steadily on the 373 kilometers and 636 meters section of the Chengdu-Guizhou Railway, marking the official start of track laying for the Yunnan-Guizhou section of the Chengdu-Guizhou Railway and a solid step forward in the construction process of the Chengdu-Guizhou Railway.

The newly-built Leshan to Guiyang section of the Chengdu-Guizhou Railway starts from Leshan City in Sichuan Province in the west,and goes east through Jianwei County, Yibin City, Changning County, and Xingwen County in Sichuan Province, Weixin County and Zhenxiong County in Yunnan Province, Bijie City, Dafang County, and Qianxi County in Guizhou Province ,and finally enters the urban area of Guiyang. The Chengdu-Guizhou Railway is 632 kilometers long, of which the Chengdu East to Leshan section is about 117 kilometers and was opened for operation on December 20,2014.The newly built Leshan to Guiyang section is about 515 kilometers long, of which about 259 kilometers are in Sichuan Province, about 79 kilometers are in Yunnan Province, and about 177 kilometers are in Guizhou Province.It has a designed speed of 250 kilometers per hour, passing through the Sichuan Basin at an altitude of 260 meters to the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau at an altitude of 2,400 meters. There are 183 new tunnels and 468 bridges, with a tunnel ratio of 81.5%. The slopes in some difficult sections are as high as 25‰ to 30‰.

It is understood that the Chengdu-Guizhou Railway will be laid using 500-meter specially made long rails and is expected to be completed in June 2019. After the Chengdu-Guizhou Railway is completed, it will mainly carry the passenger flow from western Sichuan, southern Sichuan, northern Sichuan, northwestern Sichuan and Guizhou, southern China, Hunan, Fujian, Jiangxi and Zhejiang, and will benefit more than 36 million people along the line. At that time, the time and space distance between Chengdu and Guiyang is expected to be further shortened.